China has declared it is"ready to fight" over the future of Taiwan, an island to which it has no historical or legal claims. In many ways, its vociferous rhetoric mirrors that of Russia before its Ukraine invasion. At the time, many American analysts took Russia’s assessment of its military at face value.
As my colleague, demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, has pointed out, China today pays the price for decades of its one-child policy, economically, socially, and militarily. In October 2022, I visited the Indian frontier with China high in the Ladakh mountains, many of whose peaks exceed 20,000 feet. On average, every Indian soldier defending their homeland had three brothers or sisters. Every Chinese soldier just a couple kilometers away was an only child.
China’s growth and affluence would also raise the stakes on the homefront. Perhaps the greatest mistake of the Biden administration’s approach to Ukraine has been its demand Ukrainians limit the fight to within their borders. This, in turn, diminished the cost to Russia of its aggression.
mrubin1971 If you think they're not ready, you are sadly fooling yourself.
mrubin1971 I would hate for us to have to find out. Either way.
mrubin1971 China's vessels can't sail past Vietnam. We can blow each one out of the water like in an Atari game. I'm sick of pundits saying 'China has a larger army than the United States.' That's like me saying I have a larger army because I have 6000 rubber duckies in my bathtub that the…
mrubin1971 I think China is a bully.
mrubin1971 A country with 1.5BI citizens worried about losing 100-200thousand 'only child' is naive compared to the Taiwanese issue.
mrubin1971 I don't think it will be a war they will take us from within, they own us.
mrubin1971 Russia a 'paper tiger?' Are you kidding?